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This is one of an occasional series featuring direct marketing leaders who will share five key insights they have learned from their career in marketing and advertising.

Recently your Friday Forecaster chatted with Marianna Morello, the trailblazing entrepreneur who founded Manhattan Media Services some 22 years ago. Here are five key insights she shared with us that have helped provide the foundation of her success.

Note: This is the third in a series of six blog posts being featured in the coming weeks and months based on principles found in Dr. Robert Cialdini’s seminal psychology book entitled Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. It is essential reading for any marketer.

The scarcity principle recognizes two powerful impulses that drive the human condition: 1) that people want what they can’t have; and 2) that as soon as someone is told something is unavailable, they tend to want it even more.

This is the first of an occasional series featuring direct marketing leaders who will share five key insights they have learned from their career in marketing and advertising.

Recently your Friday Forecaster sat down with Visionworx CEO and ERA member Nancy Duitch, a 30 veteran of direct marketing who has worked on both the client and agency side, generating over $3 billion in Omni-Channel sales. We asked her to consider five key insights she could share with our audience based upon a lifetime of learning.

Note: This is the second in a series of six blog posts in the coming weeks and months based on principles found in Dr. Robert Cialdini’s seminal psychology book entitled Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. It is essential reading for any marketer.

The law of reciprocity says that if you do something for someone, they feel indebted to you. It is a human impulse that is universal and exists in every culture across the globe. Allow me to illustrate the point: If you shop at Costco, see if this sounds familiar.

“Please don’t hire anyone else.” This was the plea of a colleague many years ago when I traveled north from California to Oregon to a production company known as Tyee. Tasked with building a media planning and buying arm, my job was to transform the business into a full-fledged advertising agency. As someone whose ambition was intent on growth, I was, needless to say, taken aback by this comment. The person making the appeal wanted things to be the way they used to be, when the organization, led by a handful of partners, was small and family-like. This individual was opposed to the one thing that we all know is constant: change.

Note: This will be the first in a series of six blog posts in the coming weeks and months based on principles found in Dr. Robert Cialdini’s seminal psychology book entitled Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. It is essential reading for any marketer.

“Liking” is a powerful motivator when it comes to transacting business – and life. In the simplest terms, people do business with people they like.

An article in Barron’s published this last weekend entitled “TV’s Sports Problem” contained this startling forecast: that by 2020, Google and YouTube parent Alphabet, Facebook, and Amazon could have $100 billion in free cash flow in their coffers on a combined basis, compared to $30 billion for broadcasters ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. That means the online marketers will have more than three times the amount of money to bid for sports rights, and to create original programming to compete with conventional television channels.

Every marketer knows that products have a natural lifespan, perhaps best exemplified by the classic product adoption life cycle that resembles a bell curve (Figure 1). In the simplest terms, this curve breaks consumers into groups within the overall pool of buyers for a given product.

CBS news magazine 60 Minutes ran a segment entitled “The Influencers”. This must see segment is about 20-somethings who are currently making hundreds of thousands of dollars by leveraging the power of their social media presence to endorse products for some of the world’s largest brands. It is an eye-opening segment that every marketer needs to see.

Whether you’re new to the Electronic Retailing Association (ERA) or a veteran, the question of how to make the most of one’s membership is always pertinent. And as the association enters its second quarter-century, the industry faces a paradoxical conundrum: On the one hand, direct response television (DRTV), the advertising strategy that has long defined the group, has reached such a level of maturity that it is now embraced well beyond the confines of the association and the practitioners within it. Meanwhile, the digital age that dominates most of today’s marketing conversations remains in a constant state of change.

At the tender age of 16 I took my first job: pumping gas at a service station. While the adjoining carwash was already automated, the idea that I might no longer be needed came as a surprise. My initial response was, “No way are people going to pump their own gas and stick a credit card in a machine.”

Fast-forward to today, and it’s a shock there isn’t a sketch of my adolescent self in the dictionary next to the word naïve.

Good advertising engages its audience on both a rational and emotional level, using a series of levers—or triggers—in an attempt to persuade prospects to buy a product or service. Tactics run the gamut, from the formulaic approach of many “As Seen On TV” pitches to Super Bowl commercials that rely on creative ploys that are often completely tangential to what’s being sold in an effort to arrest attention by any means necessary.

Prior to the arrival of the Internet, direct response television (DRTV) marketers and their agencies could measure response and sales with reasonable certainty. With dedicated toll-free numbers, advertisers could accurately gauge the number of calls and revenue resulting from individual airings. DRTV was accountable advertising with measurable ROI, as opposed to impression-based advertising, where the metrics were much more squishy.

Editorial Disclaimer: The statements, opinions, and advertisements expressed on the ERA Blog and other online entities owned by the Electronic Retailing Association are those of individual authors and companies and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Electronic Retailing Association.

At the recent D2C convention, I was humbled and grateful to receive the ERA Volunteer of the Year award at the Moxie Awards Gala on the conference’s final night. Amid the various congratulations and well wishes, I heard another kind of rumble: that ERA was not doing its job, as if the organizational part of ERA somehow defined the association in its totality.

There’s an expression that says, “Do what you love, and the money will follow.” And while the business leaders you’re about to meet have built substantive enterprises that are a testament to economic success, this article is about a different kind of love—the kind that combines a passion for work and a foundation of trust and tenderness unique to families.

Would you like to discover how leading brands such as Dollar Shave Club, eHarmony, Nutrisystem, and TemperPedic have used a combination of digital marketing and DRTV to scale their business? Attend the Masters Series session, Scale Your Digital Business Without Blowing Your Budget, at this year’s D2C Convention, and you will gain real insights from marketers who are in the trenches helping to build category leaders.

You won’t just get war stories, but real, actionable information about what it takes to succeed in a hyper-competitive omnichannel world.

Editorial Disclaimer: The statements, opinions, and advertisements expressed on the ERA Blog and other online entities owned by the Electronic Retailing Association are those of individual authors and companies and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Electronic Retailing Association.

Tonight the second Republican Presidential debate will unfold on CNN. Given that the first debate broadcast on Fox News garnered a national audience of 24 million viewers, the largest viewership for a non-sporting event in cable history, there is much anticipation and excitement in advance of this evening’s event. Of course there is one, forgive the term, primary reason why: reality star Donald Trump, aka the Teflon Don.

Editorial Disclaimer: The statements, opinions, and advertisements expressed on the ERA Blog and other online entities owned by the Electronic Retailing Association are those of individual authors and companies and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Electronic Retailing Association.

The stunning downfall of “the Subway Guy” — aka Jared Fogle — is a cautionary tale for advertisers who employ spokespeople as endorsers for their products or services. In a recent Dish column in ER magazine entitled “Pitch Perfect,” I explored the debate of whether to use a celebrity or a professional pitch person.

For years, just two lengths, :120 and :60, have dominated short-form direct response television (DRTV) commercials. This is how long it takes to outline a problem and a solution, articulate a product’s benefits and features, make a direct offer, and (hopefully) close the sale—or so goes the prevailing wisdom.

The exceptions have been lead-generating spots, which easily make their proposition in 60 or 30 seconds.

One of the reasons the direct marketing game is so much fun is that it provides instant gratification. A marketer puts up an ad and an offer, then waits for the phone to ring and the shopping carts to fill. But with the predominance of the Internet, that equation has changed. Once a consumer’s curiosity is piqued, they will often go on the hunt, armed with a second screen, to seek more information that empowers them to make an informed purchase decision. It is no longer adequate to simply ask for the order by posting one’s call to action on a microsite.

The statements, opinions, and advertisements expressed on the ERA Blog and other online entities owned by the Electronic Retailing Association are those of individual authors and companies and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Electronic Retailing Association.

Another day, a new atrocity. Every day amid these dark days, the world awakens to another cruel affront to humanity by way of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant also known as ISIS or ISIL. A byproduct of the ceaseless flow of bloodshed is the steady stream of recruits joining their army of terror from all corners of the world. While conventional marketers have wondered if social media can be used to sell a message, ISIS is effectively leveraging social to not only recruit, but to “close the sale.”

As mentioned in a previous blog post Nationwide's Super Bowl Ad Fumbles, nobody knows how to serve up advertising reliant on the concept of “borrowed interest” quite like GEICO. From cavemen to talking geckos, advertisers will use any humorous means at their disposal to get their name in front of you. But now the insurance advertiser, which spends a reported $1 billion per year, may have outdone itself with a new series of online pre-roll ads that subvert expectations and surprise and delight.

Editorial Disclaimer: The statements, opinions, and advertisements expressed on the ERA Blog and other online entities owned by the Electronic Retailing Association are those of individual authors and companies and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Electronic Retailing Association.

“There is no such thing as bad publicity,” a quote often attributed to the supreme American huckster P.T. Barnum, appears to be the third rail that Nationwide Insurance held onto firmly while rationalizing their now infamous and ill-advised Super Bowl XLIX commercial entitled “Make Safe Happen.”

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Editorial Disclaimer

The statements, opinions, and advertisements expressed on the ERA Blog and other online entities owned by the Electronic Retailing Association are those of individual authors and companies and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Electronic Retailing Association.